The incident, which occurred in Mazar-iSharif, a city in northern Afghanistan, represents one of the single worst examples of killings of civilians in Afghanistans twenty-year war.

The Taliban forces that captured Mazar-iSharif included Pashtuns from Balkh, the province of which Mazar is the capital and the name of a town northwest of Mazar.

Their testimonies about the events in Mazar-iSharif from August 8 through early September are consistent in the depiction of the patterns of attack by the advancing Taliban troops, the systematic nature of the search operations, the sorting of prisoners at the jail, and the transport of prisoners.

Mazar is also becoming an important industrial city with a thermal power station (36,000 kw), chemical fertilizer plant (105,000 tons urea annually), textile, raisin factories, and modern tanneries.

It is visited by countless pilgrims throughout the year and particularly on Nawroz (21 March) when the great Janda (religious banner) is raised to announce the beginning of spring and the coming of the New Year.

Made of cotton or silk (abreshom), quilted for winter and single weight for summer, the favorite colors are green with narrow red or fl stripes; gold with fl; dark blue with red; and the popular green, silver and fuchsia, in wide stripes.

Since their arrival in Mazar-e Sharif, the Taleban have sealed the area to foreign media and independent observers.

Detainees, reportedly totalling thousands, were transferred in military vehicles to detention centres in Mazar-e Sharif and Shebarghan and interrogated to identify their ethnic identity.

The organization is also calling for an international body, with a clearly demonstrated independent, impartial and competent structure, to be set up to investigate these human rights abuses with a view to identifying the perpetrators and recommending means of bringing them to justice.

MAZAR -I- Sharif, a town of Afghanistan, the capital of the province of Afghan Turkestan.

Owing to the importance of the military cantonment of Takhtapul, and its religious sanctity, it has long ago supplanted the more ancient capital of Balkh.

In this neighbourhood is concentrated most of the Afghan army north of the Hindu Kush mountains, the fortified cantonment of Dehdadi having been completed by Sirdar Ghulam Ali Khan and incorporated with Mazar.

CNN has not been able to independently confirm this information, but Western officials who have daily contact with personnel in Mazar-e Sharif say that the majority of those killed are Pakistani and Kashmiri fighters as well as family members of Chechen fighters who have sided with the Taliban forces in Afghanistan.

The strategic town of Mazar-e Sharif is particularly vulnerable as it has a bloody history of tribal warfare.

Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek, ruled Mazar-e Sharif for 10 years, and the city's population is made of up ethnic Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras.

The incident, which occurred in Mazar-iSharif, a city in northern Afghanistan, represents one of the single worst examples of civilian killings in Afghanistan's twenty-year war where At least 8000 Hazaras were singled out and massacred by the Taliban regime.

Their testimonies about the events in Mazar-iSharif from August 8 through early September are consistent in the depiction of the patterns of attack by the advancing Taliban troops, the systematic nature of the search operations, the sorting of prisoners at the jail, and the transport of prisoners.

The refugees from Mazar-iSharif are scattered throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan.

According to NTV, the opposition forces are in a hurry to establish control over MazarSharif before the launching of US ground attack from the Uzbekistan territory to gain a bargaining position.

The US Special Forces could be planning to make MazarSharif their main base for advancing deep into Afghanistan, "just like the Soviets did in 1979", NTV added.

As NTV was reporting the capture of MazarSharif, another Northern Alliance general, Esma’il Khan claimed that five Taleban commanders, including one general, defected to his side with 900 soldiers, "complete with arms and ammunitions".

In addition, there are reports that the Taliban have been reinforcing Mazar, pulling in troops from other parts of the country.

Pentagon officials even acknowledged that the U.S. was flying in food for Alliance fighters’ horses and that special-forces soldiers of the world’s most technologically sophisticated military force had watched their allies launch cavalry charges against Taliban tanks and artillery positions.

The largest city in the north of the country, Mazar sits on the main east-west road and has two large airfields that could prove useful as forward bases for U.S. air operations and humanitarian aid flights.

Second, the fall of Mazar-e Sharif appears to indicate that while air power is no panacea, it is the sine qua non of military success in the modern age when employed properly.

As was the case with Mazar-e Sharif, opposition success on the ground will depend a great deal on US air power to weaken the Taliban.

The U.S. and the Northern Alliance will be able to use the winter to their advantage, building up forces for operations in the spring and while keeping up the pressure on Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda network by employing SOF to hunt and destroy them.

Mazar-e Sharif is the 4th largest city in Afghanistan, and it was founded in the 12th century after a local mullah dreamt of the secret site where Ali bin Talib, the Prophet's cousin and the fourth caliph of Islam, had been buried (outside of Afghanistan most Muslims believe that Ali is buried in Najaf, Iraq).

The town, however, continued to live in the shadow of its larger neighbor, Balkh, until that city was abandoned due to disease in the mid 19th century.

Mazar's airport (code MZR) is located 9kms east of the city, a journey of 15 minutes by taxi.

Situated about 100 miles from the Uzbekistan border, Mazar-e Sharif is hardly a central city in Afghanistan, nor is it the country's most populated or industrialized.

U.S. military personnel are currently perched along the Uzbek-Afghanistan border north of Mazar-e Sharif, ready to rush in food, clothing and other aid to civilians, as well as military equipment and supplies for Northern Alliance forces.

The fall of Mazar-e Sharif may persuade Afghan warlords, who have a long history of switching to the winning side, to foresee the war's outcome and actively throw their support behind the Northern Alliance and fellow opposition forces.

Northern Alliance officials also said their fighters were moving into the region between Mazar-e Sharif and the border with Uzbekistan, an important stretch of land because that could open supply routes from Uzbekistan to northern Afghanistan for both military and humanitarian aid.

Mazar-e Sharif has also been the scene of heavy fighting for several weeks because it is home to northern Afghanistan's largest airfield.

Both Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, former Soviet republics, are cooperating with the U.S.-led coalition and are poised to send in supplies for the Northern Alliance and relief for refugees once its clear the Taliban has been routed in the northern areas.

TASHKENT, Uzbekistan  Mazar-e Sharif, which soon may be the first major Afghan city under Taliban control to fall to soldiers of the Northern Alliance, has long been a highly prized strategic crossroads.

He said commanders around Mazar-e Sharif and in other regions were discussing terms for switching sides to the alliance.

The Taliban first entered Mazar-e Sharif in May 1997, at the invitation of a local warlord who betrayed his former anti-Taliban allies.

Characterizing all of Afghanistan as an active war zone, Stufflebeem told reporters at a Pentagon press briefing that "from day-to-day, or hour-to-hour in some places, it may be hotter in one place then the next." Consequently, he said, "There is a lot of dust in the air right now.

Though talking outcomes now is premature, he said, the capture of Mazar-e Sharif would be a huge Northern Alliance success.

Asked whether Taliban forces are still in a position to launch a counteroffensive, he said he didn't know but warned that the fact they haven't doesn't mean they can't.

Fall of Mazar heralds Taliban collapse in north - Jane's International Security News(Site not responding. Last check: )

The surprise fall of the Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif and the dramatic domino-like collapse of other Taliban-held towns in the north, including Taloqan, has fundamentally altered the balance of power in the country and may mark the beginning of the end of Taliban military power.

The collapse of the ethnic Pushtun Taliban in the minority-dominated north began on 9 November with the UF seizure of Mazar-e Sharif, the lynchpin of the Taliban hold on the north.

According to senior UF sources some 5,000 Taliban and allied forces are believed to have abandoned Mazar and Heiratan, leaving behind them all their armour and heavy weapons.

The hypocrisy of US policy and corporate media complicity is evident in the coverage of Donald Rumsfeld's stop over in Mazar-e Sharif Afghanistan December 4 to meet with regional warlord and mass killer General Abdul Rashid Dostum and his rival General Ustad Atta Mohammed.

Rumsfeld was there to finalize a deal with the warlords to begin the decommissioning of their military forces in exchange for millions of dollars in international aid and increased power in the central Afghan government.

A documentary entitled Massacre at Mazar released in 2002 by Scottish film producer, Jamie Doran, exposes how Dostum, in cooperation with U.S. special forces, was responsible for the torturing and deaths of approximately 3,000 Taliban prisoners-of-war in November of 2001.

A U.S. Army Civil Affairs troop in Mazar-e Sharif has tea and cookies with the professors of the Balkh University in Mazar- Sharif, Dec. 17, 2001.

BuzKashi, Buz meaning horns and Kashi meaning to pull, is a sport, in Afghanistan, where men on horseback and foot long whips with thickly padded boots struggle to pull an 80 pound calf carcass around a flag for 1 point or into a chalk whited circle for 2 points on a vast field.

BuzKashi, Buz meaning horns and Kashi meaning to pull, is an Afghani sport where men on horsback and foot long whips with thickly padded boots struggle to pull an eighty pound calf carcass around a flag for one point or into a chalk whited circle for two points on a vast field.

It's not clear where the retreating Taliban forces are headed, and reports from Mazar-i-Sharif said some of their forces had regrouped on an adjacent hillside and were blasting the city with rockets.

The fall of Mazar appeared to signal a collapse of the Taliban's hold on northern Afghanistan, with Alliance troops quickly capturing two important towns to the north and east, and more importantly, almost immediately opening up a land corridor from the Uzbek border.

Even if the Alliance is unable to press their momentum at Kabul, the fall of Mazar is a signal that even if the Taliban manage to hold out for many more months, their best years are behind them.